


Aftermath (Infinity War)

by thatbluenote



Category: Guardians of the Galaxy (Movies), Iron Man (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies), Thor (Movies)
Genre: Aftermath of Violence, Anger, Angst, Bucky Feels, Canonical Character Death, F/F, F/M, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Infinity War, Infinity War canon compliant, M/M, Post Infinity War, Rocket feels, Spoilers, Stucky - Freeform, Then I wrote this, i cried a lot, seriously major spoilers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-29
Updated: 2018-04-29
Packaged: 2019-04-29 09:51:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,642
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14470086
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thatbluenote/pseuds/thatbluenote
Summary: (Spoilers, obviously)Later they will have to figure out what to do, what toreallydo.Right now, there is a battlefield of the dead.Life in the immediate aftermath.





	Aftermath (Infinity War)

**Author's Note:**

> Just before this starts, Tony and Nebula make it back to earth and join the others in Wakanda, but that's about the only thing that goes right. 
> 
> _Things fall apart; the center cannot hold;_  
>  Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world  
> -Yeats, The Second Coming

Thanos finds the gauntlet has one limit: it will not let him undo the sacrifice on Vormir. The time stone stutters up against an immovable, fixed point in time when he tries. The tesseract stone similarly cannot move the space of it.

He shatters the cliff rock, he shatters the monoliths.

Unshatters.

Starts again.

He finds the split-second at the bottom of the cliff. His features illuminated by the stone’s green glow as he grits time back against the moment of sacrifice, like sharpening a blade against stone.

Her body falling, then fallen. His Gamora, alive for one last defiant second; then dead. The price he pays; then, paid. The soul stone becoming his, irrevocably.

Her falling form. Her fallen form.

Falling, red hair haloed, eyes upturned.

Fallen, blood pooling, eyes dimmed.

Again. And again.

 _Necessary_.

Agony.

 

-

 

Thor is a mute force on the bloody, silent battlefield, recovering bodies with dignity. Reshaping the rock and forestland where it was plowed up.

Pulling corpse after alien corpse off the bodies of Earth’s fallen.

When Tony arrives, he goes straight to Thor’s side but Thor will only say he plans to fly the gauntlet into the heart of the Nidavellir forge, into the dying star that birthed its power. The axe gleams with Asgardian magic when he wields it, shunting a massive log across an empty field.

Tony knows they are lost. There is no way to get the gauntlet. Argues simply to get a rise out of Thor, saying they should use the star forge to turn the gauntlet into something capable of imprisoning Thanos instead.

Tony won’t say what he’s really thinking. That there’s no way to get near the most powerful being in the universe. Not a second time, anyway.

Thor won’t look at him as they work. Their argument about the forge rages on.

 

-

 

Tony’s suit warns him when he nearly pushes it too far, and he takes himself back to the Wakanda laboratories to find a power source to recharge and fix some of the worst damage. A medical aide fixes up the worrisome gash in his chest, but aside from a dull ache, he cannot feel anything.

Refuses to call Pepper because Pepper has not called him, which is the worst sort of information to have.

Instead, Tony tinkers with the broken remnants of Vision, powering up the AI. The body remains a dull, lifeless heap but the AI pulses and even lives for one beautiful, hopeful second before it crashes under a critical recursion query that reads out in a broken stutter, _Wanda Wanda Wanda Wanda Soul Stone Wanda_ until the whole server bank goes dead. Tony rips the power cord out of the wall and tells FRIDAY to start again.

 

-

 

Rocket shrugs off Nebula because he would much rather pick over the alien tech that the Wakandans are heaping to one side of the battlefield than listen to some stupid lecture about Vormir.

This horde of parts might contain something good to sell, but when night falls his pockets are bulging with something else. He finds a ledge under which to hide, and lies down.

Slowly removes from his pockets each tiny fragment of wood and plants them in the soil, a miniature stockade around him. He will watch them until they sprout, or until he sleeps, and then he will collect more.

In the darkness, light glints off the edge of something out on the battlefield. It’s Thor with Stormbreaker. The axe’s handle gleams, perfect and unbreakable. Rocket’s eyes go blank. He goes back to the wreckage of the battle to search again.

 

-

 

When night falls, Nat corners Steve and forces him to rest. The burial detail from the Wakandan military lights a series of bonfires, ringing the city. The scale of the firelight is painful because it should be larger, brighter.

The city is half-empty, but there are no bodies for so many deaths.

They take turns sleeping back to back, one sleeping, the other on guard, just like they did so many times when they were on the run.

Cap wakes screaming, muscles tightly locked, at the nightmare worse than the freight train, worse than Budapest; Bucky saying his name and then disintegrating, ash in the wind.

Nat holds him tightly as he heaves into the darkness, hoarse and empty. Waits for himself to disintegrate. Thinks it would be easier.

_He thought they had so much time._

 

-

 

Bruce can’t think about it, so he disappears into Shuri’s lab, repairing the mech suit, learning their systems, doing what he can when the medic teams need help. Then he discreetly arranges for undisturbed time in a deep, abandoned vibranium mineshaft where he attempts, over and over again, to wake the sleeper.

Every green, screaming attempt ends in failure.

Nat says she isn’t mad but she won’t speak more than four words at a time to him, either.

When he finally returns to the surface he is exhausted, emptied, even more numb than he thinks possible.

Improbably, his phone buzzes in his pocket. His email has 642 notifications from the particle and nuclear physics listserv. Each one a list of names from different universities. Colleagues gone, missing, dead. Both those who faded into ashes, and those who died in the aftermath of the ashes.

But does anybody think they need universities anymore? Bruce isn’t so sure.

 

-

 

The legion of Dora Milaje under Okoye are fragmented when they reassemble. News travels quickly of the disappeared in Wakanda, and one warrior simply lays down her weapons and walks off the field without a second glance. No one says a word to her.

Okoye cannot think, cannot breathe, cannot process the scale of loss and devastation, but she can accord the dead their dignity. Each step across the soil is a step on ash. _T’Challa_. Does not think because then she will have to believe it.

The Dora Milaje lift each warrior into a position of repose, and by silent agreement leave the alien bodies to the Avengers who work by their side.

It isn’t long before three elders pick their way across the smoking battlefield to bring dried heart plant incense for the death rites. But they have something more to say; they pull Okoye aside. She must assume power. Numbly, she nods at her second in command to take over, and follows the elders.

Behind her, the Dora Milaje preside over the first battlefield honors. The incense burns her eyes. Okoye turns to see the small cadre of women, draped in grief, flame still burning within them, pure and strong and with something new mingled there. Like rage.

 

-

 

That last light in Bucky’s eyes.

Hours before, as they prepared weapons and armor, he had said _I have so much to tell you_.

Steve thought they had so much time.

 

-

 

Natasha feels like she is flying blind because the global comms infrastructure is in such chaos. All she can do is connect to the remnants of civilization not burning, the intelligence networks not panicked so much as baffled. There is no contingency plan here. Post-Sokovian Accords, what did they think would happen? But she’s past being able to think like that anymore. It will be a miracle if the remainder of the world can survive the week.

There are one or two terrified operatives reporting from Tony’s Avengers base in upstate New York. They report only half-uttered, broken phrases. They have no word of Clint, whose last message for her was _Caracas_ . Their code word for _Safehouse Compromised_.

When she guards Steve’s sleep, she finds no peace in the usual rituals. Exits, safe zones, escape routes. Wanda. Vision. T’Challa. Bucky. Peter. Sam. So many others she didn’t know or have names for.

 

-

 

Nebula ignores the fire in every nerve and cybernetic fiber because at first she thinks it is no different from the pain that torture left lingering there. On the strange, hot plains of Earth, the raccoon is the only one who knows her, apart from the stranger Tony Stark who begged her to pilot the Titan craft here. Stark won’t listen, just blasts off to help clean up the battlefield.

The raccoon will not stop sifting the charred ashes and pocketing little fragments long enough to even look at her when she tries to talk to him. Tries to get him to understand.

The fire in Nebula burns hotter than she’s ever known. These idiots fought Thanos and are mired in death and grief but do not _understand_. Not a one.

For so long she nursed such cold fury toward her sister, when she heard Gamora had burnt the map to the soul stone Nebula knew, with white-hot certainty, that there was something worse than the fury and the pain. _I just needed a sister_. Something worse than the tortures of childhood.

It was the knowledge that Gamora was certain of Thanos’ love. Her certainty that she stood between Thanos and the soul stone.

And now she’s gone. Nebula is the only one who knows why. There are plenty who want to kill Thanos, that was true before this mess and is especially true now, but Nebula is the only one who will kill him for Gamora.

Nebula is the only one left. The furious soul of hate within her is that fire running through her brighter and hotter than pain ever could; she understands that now.

These fools who think they have fought Thanos. They fought and believed they would win.

No, they did not even fight Thanos. They merely lost to him.

Nebula knows losing.

But she has not even begun to fight.

 

-

 

Her falling form. Her fallen form.

The knife’s edge of agony he cannot undo.

No _snap_ can change this. The time stone’s cruel light flickering, sickly. The soul stone burns brighter every time he tries.

Falling. Fallen.

 _Necessary_.

Again. And again.

**Author's Note:**

> Saw it approximately 12 hours ago, spent the first half of the day crying then reading thru AO3 fix-its, second half writing this. I was not fucking ready. I'm still not ready. I'm Thanos at the foot of the cliff and I can't get back my life from before I saw this movie D: D: D:


End file.
